Talk:Can God create a rock so heavy that he can't lift it?

WRT the last paragraph: is this really a cop-out? It only limits God to that which is logically possible, not just that which is physically possible. That is, defining God to be unable to have an apple and to not have any apples simultaneously does not necessarily limit his ability to travel faster than light, or go backward in time, or create planets out of nowhere. --Arensb 17:50, 17 July 2006 (MST)

Perhaps cop-out isn't quite the right term. First, I wish to highlight the fact that "all-powerful" is a weird term to use once you start putting qualifiers on what "all" means. And they don't really stop at the logically impossible; they also say that God can't do things that are against his nature, whatever that means. It seems to me that when you start specifying the limitations on what God can do, it's sort of a "gateway drug" to deciding that you can add all kinds of restrictions and still say that he's omnipotent.

If you can word that better, feel free to fix it. --Kazim 07:24, 18 July 2006 (MST)

I think you're making a sorites argument: "a god who can do everything, even the logically-impossible, is omnipotent"; "a god who can do everything except the logically-impossible is still omnipotent"; and so on, until we get to "a god who can usually raise his hand if no one's standing on it is still omnipotent".

I'll accept that "God can do anything he can do" is a useless tautology. But in this case, ISTM that it's up to the theist to define "omnipotence" in some reasonable way. The fact that there can be different degrees of omnipotence does not mean that they're all reasonable. --Arensb 08:52, 18 July 2006 (MST)